This thesis examines statements made about immigration and mental health in Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie follows a young Nigerian immigrant as she navigates her move to the U.S. and explores the meaning of belonging and identity in the U.S. and Nigeria. Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans is about a Mexican family that immigrates to Delaware in order to secure better treatment for their daughter and touches on the nuances of the Latinx immigrant identity in the U.S. Both of these texts feature the lack of resources and support available for immigrants of color which eventually lead the characters to return to their country of origin. This thesis posits that Adichie and Henriquez are both suggesting in their respective works that the U.S. fails to ensure the success and well-being of immigrants which leads to a deterioration of mental health and feelings of not belonging. A Portrait of Neglect considers the real life implications of Adichie’s and Henriquez’s ideas and the impact of their representations of immigration and mental health.

For immigrants around the world, the United States represents hope for a new life and new opportunities. Colleen Vesely, Bethany Letiecq, and Rachael Goodman, in their article “Parenting Across Two Worlds: Low-Income Latina Immigrants’ Adaptation to Motherhood in the United States” provide examples of how real-world Latinx immigrant mothers view their experience in the United States. Many of the stories they include tell idealized versions of the American dream, what all people hope for when they immigrate to America. The immigrants they interviewed commonly talk about how they want to create a better life for their children and how by creating a better life for them it made the entire struggle worth it. Vesely, Letiecq, and Goodman do not just focus on the positives of immigration, they also explore the different barriers they must overcome in order to even try and achieve the ideal immigration experience they dream of. Cristina Henríquez perfectly embodies both the hopes and struggles of immigrants in her novel The Book of Unknown Americans (2015) by using the viewpoints of multiple immigrants to tell their specific immigration stories. This project uses Vesely, Letiecq, and Goodman’s article about the challenges of Latinx immigrant mothers’ experiences in the United States as a basis for my argument. In this thesis I postulate that motherhood, as it others women, has a negative impact on the ability of these Latinx immigrant mothers to create a place for themselves and feel a sense of belonging as depicted in Cristina Henríquez’s The Book Unknown of Americans (2015).

Colonialism is the practice of conquering lands of already established individuals for the<br/>greater good of Western civilization. These actions are often rooted in the idea that the ways of<br/>the indigenous people are almost primitive in comparison to the ways of the West. Many forms<br/>of modern-day oppression are rooted in the disastrous acts against marginalized groups during<br/>colonial eras. In discourse relating to colonialism, it is necessary that the topic of the sexualization of<br/>Native groups are mentioned. Sexualization can be referred to as the act of sexualizing both<br/>humans and objects that are not intended to be innately sexual.<br/>Many literary texts were written during the nineteenth century expose the trends of<br/>sexualization towards indigenous peoples. More specifically, Heart of Darkness brings light to<br/>colonialism and provides insight into the European man’s sexualization for the Native woman.<br/>Within the text, the sexualization for the Native Congo woman is undeniably present all<br/>throughout the novel. Within the novella, the main character, Marlow, is infatuated with many<br/>aspects of the Native culture. He takes a particular interest in the land, when describing the land<br/>he uses verbiage such as “impenetrable” to describe lands that have yet to be discovered by<br/>Westerners. He describes the ways in which he no longer finds interest in lands that have been<br/>“penetrated”. These sexual undertones of virginity used to describe the Native land can be<br/>compared to that of a Native woman. Various aspects of the Native culture were sexualized in<br/>this similar manner, the sexual perspective they had on the Native women was so strong that<br/>they viewed all aspects of the Native sexually due to their linkage to the Native woman. This<br/>thesis serves to address the sexual connections made between the land and culture of the Congo<br/>to the Native woman. Many scholars praise the author for including a Native woman of power<br/><br/>within the text, however, this thesis contradicts these claims and analyzes the ways in which this<br/>The native woman is only powerful due to the European male gaze.<br/><br/>to how Africans within the congo were treated during their colonial era. The text provides<br/>insight into the unhealthy environments the Africans were forced to live in. They were forced to<br/>eat hippo meat and many physically looked as if they were on the verge of death while their<br/>white counterparts were dressed in luxury. Additionally, there was carelessness for the bodies<br/>of the Africans. Many were oversexualized and taken advantage of, due to the power systems<br/>placed upon them they were unable to deny any advances even if they wanted to. These systems<br/>of oppression are still in place, literary analysis of the remnants of colonialism can be found<br/>through twentieth and twenty-first-century texts.

This thesis focuses on Bram Stoker’s 1897 British novel 'Dracula' and its association of medical technology with a myriad of Victorian British societal anxieties, facilitating an examination of current and historical fears about medical intervention and medical innovation. Dracula’s parallel yet opposite portrayals of blood transfusion and vampirism allow fears of medical technology to be exaggerated and explored within the realm of the supernatural. In Dracula and today, the desire to restore the health of ourselves and our loved ones is accompanied by fears that medical treatment will cause harm; will reshape our conceptualization of death and thus our relationship with death; and, as new technologies with unestablished consequences are employed, that medical intervention may in fact erode our basic identity and humanity.

Late Victorian fiction presents scenes of near-death experience that places characters within the literature in a state of precarity. The precarious existence manifests itself as a perpetual near-death experience that makes visible the necropolitical power dynamic and the “death-in-life” condition. Key moments in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and Bram Stoker’s Dracula provide evidence for the precarity under which people live in late Victorian literature. Both novels uniquely feature a process of becoming-object, Moreau’s humanization process and Dracula’s vampirization process, that places the victims in a state of precarity and death-in-life. Previous scholars have examined these processes as a means of establishing precarity and as a near-death experience, yet none have contextualized these scenes of precarity within Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics. In an extended reading of both novels, this essay shows how Victorians function as administrators of necropolitics, victimizing non-Victorians to processes of becoming-object, and pushing these victim-objects to the brink of death, where they continue to live in a state of death-in-life. This essay focuses on these two novels because of their genre differences and their geographical differences, which further demonstrates the Victorian attentiveness towards scenes of precarity involving the marginalized and the “Oriental.” Despite scenes of precarity involving select Victorians, both novels inevitably reinforce the necropolitical Victorian hegemony. In the face of over a century of British colonialism, the threat of the colonized breaking the necropolitical hegemony of the Victorian empire is hyper-present in both late Victorian science fiction and gothic fiction, suggesting this anxiety of having precarity established over their own lives by the former oppressed was shared by the majority of the Victorian Empire.

British colonialism was a well-established facet of Western history. The British have been especially notable in colonizing countries within Africa as well as India. In terms of India, the ramifications of their actions have had a significant impact on the social and political structure from the 19th century to modernity. Many scholars have alleged that brutalities set forth by the British and the discriminatory practices enforced onto the Indian population were entirely new. However, while the violence incurred cannot be ignored, the actual governance and structural changes were heavily influenced by the Hindu caste system already established within India. The Hindu caste system is a centuries-old practice that designates followers into five, family-determined, class denominations from highest to lowest: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (merchants, landowners, skilled workers), Shudras (farmworkers, servants, and unskilled workers), and Dalits (out-casts). The given thesis focuses on the perceptions and interactions of the British in 19th century India as well as the structural changes enforced by the British. Numerous nineteenth-century texts such as Up the Country by Emily Eden and India in 1848 by Arthur Mills, M.P. Murray were centered on the environment and day-to-day changes of India in the form of travel/informational readings. Both texts are utilized in this argument to highlight how the caste system was a contributing factor in British administration, contrary to the general perception of scholars. More importantly, Up the Country, offers a glimpse of the realities within northern India, where the British had the strongest control and is utilized to draw parallels between the caste system and British actions during the 1800s. The effects of discrimination and inequality continue to have a considerable effect on the Indian population to this day. However, the British have hastily been given total blame for such ramifications without considering the role of Indian societal principles in these disparities.

In Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science, gender is handled very carefully and intentionally. The women within this novel are characterized into two categories: sexually inexperienced and intellectually provocative. Women in the novel that represent the ideal English woman, such as Carmina, are presented as sexually inexperienced and full of compassion for animals. The ideal woman was child-like in her sexual inexperience and naivety towards topics easily understood by men. Meanwhile, women who represented the New Woman, such as Mrs. Gallilee, are presented as intellectually provocative and cruel. The New Woman was a woman who did not conform to societal expectations of women in the 19th century, and Collins’s interpretation of the New Woman as void of compassion reflects the public tensions against the insertion of women into male-dominated fields during the Women’s Rights Movement. This strain is integral to understanding the insurmountable pressures placed upon Victorian women in a society, such that society would dissect her choices and presentation regardless of which category she fell in.<br/><br/> Both the ideal woman and the New Woman in Wilkie Collins’s “Heart and Science” are repeatedly compared to children and animals, exposing the degraded stance of women within nineteenth-century society. Women were viewed as having lesser intellectual and emotional capabilities than their male counterparts, resulting in the association of women with other “lesser” beings. Collins’s negative portrayal of the New Woman and the pedophilic sexualization of the ideal woman represent how the Victorian woman was “vivisected” by patriarchal society. The meticulous and nonconsensual dissection of a woman’s entire being, from her sexuality to her intellectual capacity, resulted in women identifying with vivisected animals and thus resulted in a strong feminine presence in the Anti-Vivisection Movement. <br/><br/>The connection between women, the Anti-Vivisection Movement, and female sexuality provides context for the success of the Women’s Rights Movement. Victorian women stood against vivisection because they understood what it was like to have their bodies be used without their consent, and they understood the battle between men’s desires and women’s rights to their bodies. Women also identified with being picked apart by society, as a woman’s worth lay in her physical appearance and her sexual and intellectual reputation. Through the Anti-Vivisection Movement’s success, women realized that they could insert themselves into scientific conversation and succeeding at helping those who are voiceless. The traction from the Anti-Vivisection Movement carried into the fervor for the Women’s Rights Movement, because women stood together in a way that had never been done before and rejected all preconceived notions of their status in society.

The rigid hierarchical social structures that dictated nineteenth-century English society were capped at the municipal level for anyone who was not an Anglican citizen of Britain. Rather than shirk this exclusion, many communities who fell outside of the upper echelon of society mimicked this practice internally. One such example of this adoption was the Jewish community in Britain; in order to be accepted into aristocratic Britain, a handful of generationally wealthy Anglo-Jews conducted a campaign to elevate themselves across the Victorian era through demonizing their less assimilated Jewish brethren. In 1828, Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters were granted parliamentary access, and the absence of this ability shot to the forefront of concern in Jewish High-Society. What ensued was an attempt to mold their Jewishness into a form as close to Protestantism as possible, and a campaign to separate their community from the vast majority of Jews who were not Anglo-born. In an effort to distance themselves from the less palatable Jews, England's most privileged Jews placed perpetuations of antisemitic stereotypes upon other Jews in order to show their demonstrable difference. Anglo-Jews, successfully, made the case that the form of Judaism which they practiced was a more refined version of the exotic savagery that was the other type of Judaism. The influx of Eastern European refugees in the 1840s fleeing pogroms and antisemitic legislation aided Anglo-Jews in making the case for their separation from Ashkenazim. By othering, their non-anglo counterparts, the highest class of the Jewish society in Britain mimicked the British colonial mentality in verbalizing and specifying their superiority.

1. Across modern literature focusing on Victorian views of animals, scholars have observed that Victorians compare non-European people, women, and children to animals via anthropomorphization or the attribution of human characteristics to an animal. It is crucial to look at non-Europeans, women, and children because they represent a Populus that Victorians perceived as needing to be civilized. During this time period, colonization by Britain was rampant, women were questioning the validity of their societal roles, and children needed to be a successful generation for the future of Britain. The Victorian novels, Heart and Science and The Island of Doctor Moreau both provide fascinating examples of anthropomorphization in entirely different ways. Heart and Science takes place in the British metropole and merely fantasizes about anthropomorphization while The Island of Doctor realizes that fantasy on a remote island controlled by a French scientist who turns animals into humanized Beast People. Analysis of these novels allows readers to see how Victorians fantasized about anthropomorphization and how that connects back to their need for control and dominance. Furthermore, the various scholars brought up in this thesis discuss how non-Europeans, women, and children were all alike compared to canines, birds, and primates across Victorian literature and art. These scholars begin to point out the anthropomorphization that occurred in Victorian society and literature, but they either downplay the role of anthropomorphization or fail to address it. This failure leads to an inability to see the full subtly of British dominance over people regarded as undisciplined and could lead to ignorance of how long anthropomorphization has existed.

First-wave ecocriticism, while studying the relationship between humans and the environment with the focus of emphasizing the value of nature, maintains a categorical divide between these two highly connected subjects. However, second-wave ecocritical studies reduce this gap between nature and humans by analyzing the environment’s ultimate self, humans as part of that environment, and comparisons between the treatment of enslaved bodies and the land. A second-wave ecocritical approach is used to examine the vilification of wilderness versus the claim of the cultivated environment despite its violent history and its impact on other captive bodies within Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). It finds the perception of the wilderness is used to define other enslaved entities, characterizing them as villainous and so excusing their exploitation and mistreatment. Conrad's novel follows the story of Marlow and internally, the story of Kurtz, both of whom are members of The Company that goes on expeditions to find ivory in the Congo. The jungle, which is seen as a possession and exploitable by other colonists, differs from Kurtz’ view after living with the Natives in the Congo. Rather, Marlow finds that European colonists possessive hunt for ivory, a sought-after commodity, into territory they claimed for themselves after brandishing it wild, reflected their perceived darkness of the jungle back onto themselves. Morrison’s novel introduces Sethe, who kills her child, Beloved, to spare her from the life of a slave. In both novels, the utility of the enslaved body is regarded as more important than its selfhood, which serves to not only categorize slaves as lower than both humans and animals, but removes their ability to represent themselves through communication, further disallowing them to own themselves or speak against actions that have been taken against them.